Your Therapist Needs Therapy 95 - Autism, Ableism, and the Authoritarian Idiots: RFK Jr Edition

This week Jeremy rips into the dangerous rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now head of Health and Human Services, calling out his long history of anti-science rhetoric, profiteering from antivax movements, and proposed policies that threaten neurodivergent communities. Jeremy weaves RFK Jr.'s privileged, chaotic upbringing with his disastrous public health record, tying it all into a broader warning about the fascist direction of the current administration. Throughout, Jeremy stresses the urgency of public resistance to policies that dehumanize autistic and neurodivergent people.

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Transcript

efw-nuvj-npc (2025-04-28 12:36 GMT-5) - Transcript

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Jeremy Schumacher

Transcript

Jeremy Schumacher: Hello and welcome to another edition of Your Therapist Needs Therapy podcast where two mental health professionals talk about their mental health journeys and how they navigate mental wellness while working in the mental health field. I'm your host Jeremy Schumacher, licensed marriage and family therapist.  This week is a solo episode in which The therapist is me and I need therapy because the director of human health services is Robert Kennedy Jr. professional antivaxer. that is his actual profession.

Jeremy Schumacher: he gets paid a lot of money to lead the antivax and put the Kennedy name on it. He's a garbage human being and has been for a long time. We'll get into a little bit of that. And he is going to profit off of harming autistic folks. So, let's dig into that for our own sanity because we need people to speak up against this science matters, using voices to protect marginalized communities so I have been working in the mental health field for 16 years now. I am somebody who also has diagnosis of ADHD and is aware that they are also autistic.

Jeremy Schumacher: and yeah, I mean RFK is a problem for a lot of reasons. I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This year, Milwaukee has taken a concerted effort to check for lead pipes in Milwaukee public schools and get rid of any A lot of the schools in Milwaukee Lead paint is toxic. It deteriorates. It gets in the air.  It gets onto stuff that people then touch with their hands and wipe their eyes and noses. Lead paint is toxic for people. Milwaukee has requested help from the CDC and the CDC said, "Sorry, the entire department that's supposed to help with that isn't around anymore. They've been fired. That's because of RFK." So RFK is causing harm, right?

Jeremy Schumacher: you can't in one hand say environmental factors are harming people and we're going to figure that s* out when it comes to autism and then be like, "Hey, but we're going to fire all the people who help schools and public institutions get rid of lead paint in their buildings, right? the hypocrisy is maddening. but that's never the point here. The point is attacking marginalized communities and the point is profiteering.

Jeremy Schumacher: So, let's look at what got us here. RFK is a Kennedy family used to be synonymous with the Democratic Party. and some version of progressive liberalism. I think there's a lot of whitewashing of Kennedy and of JFK and a lot of imaginary hopes and dreams about what could have happened if he hadn't been shot. I'm a little more skeptical of that. Not that history is my main area of focus, but to think that Lyndon B. Johnson as good as JFK is not a stretch. so JFK was Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s uncle. and so the Kennedy family has had issues.

Jeremy Schumacher: when we look at where K it comes from a family of people dying, plane crashes, people being attempted to be assassinated. The family is at once insanely wealthy off of betting on the stock market crashing, which is I'm I'm not even being in that colloquial in that's where the Kennedy money comes from is shorting the stock market.  So, I don't know. Again, the idea that JFK was gonna save everyone from everything I think has again just been blown out of proportion. and Bobby Kennedy was like a privileged kid who went to private schools and went to a whites only school. And again, the Kennedy political machine versus the reality of what they were doing behind the scenes are different things.

00:05:00

Jeremy Schumacher: but yeah, he had some really traumatic deaths early in his life. the parenting he did receive after his dad died was not good. seems like a lot of people didn't really know what to do with him and he was a Kennedy so he just sort of got away with a lot of stuff. The weird thing with RFK Jr. is when you look at his history like dude definitely has ADHD and I'm a therapist.  a licensed one at that. So, I will ethically add here that I am not legally allowed to diagnose people who I don't work with. So, this is Jeremy the person riffing a minute here. he literally would climb the walls in his school. They were brick and he was quite lanky, I guess, and good at climbing. And so, he would literally climb the walls to his school. He was expelled from numerous schools for either cutting class, not showing up or being disruptive.

Jeremy Schumacher: He started using drugs because he talks about how hard it was for him to focus. he was weirdly into dead animals and animal carcasses. Got into falconry at a young age, which is awesome. Not the dead carcass thing that has led to problems in his life.  But falconry, that's cool, if that's your hyperfocus and you get into conservation because you spend a lot of time in the woods because you're neurode divergent and being in nature gives you a lot of dopamine, cool. Some people won't be into falconry because it's training your animal to hunt other animals. But I don't know. I'm somebody who likes nature and animals, and falcons are awesome. they're so cool.

Jeremy Schumacher: I would get into falconry and name my first Falcon Millennium because I'm a Star Wars nerd. so no, he was super disruptive, didn't stick to school, and just didn't have a lot of consequences. The family just sort of paid for him to hush, be expelled, and go to a different school. He talks about using heroin as the first time his brain would get quiet. man, you're just neurode divergent. so he's a very odd person. the Kennedy family sent a family member off to the institution to be labemized without her consent. And then when that went horribly wrong, as expected, they shipped her off to an institution and never talked about her again. So traumatic deaths in his childhood, a weird fascination with death.

Jeremy Schumacher: because of that he and his siblings would joke about another dead Kennedy and used to pull pranks on people about they got hit by their car and killed another Kennedy then one they'd miraculously recover and just make jokes about it. So kind of macob humor coming from that. he's super into again animal carcasses and stuff. Used to hang out by this field of cow carcasses and everyone was like this is weird and smells terrible. Why are you here? And he's like my falcon can catch a lot of rats so that's cool. and then started doing a ton of drugs and then he's got a family member who gets institutionalized and never spoken of again. So this shroud of secrecy that we see across socioeconomic status for families with somebody who is institutionalized. There's a lot of shame around that. I had a great grandma who was institutionalized. and I'm a mental health professional and I've never gotten the full story as to why. No one seems to know.

Jeremy Schumacher: She's married to a pastor and I work with religious trauma now. So I have some thoughts on that. I only knew her when she was deep in dementia and kind of a not nice person to be around. but again I can relate and say hey yeah I have some lived experience around what happens with secrecy when someone's institutionalized. I grew up with an aunt who's been in prison my whole life who I've never met that again just didn't get talked about in the family.  So, to see him be the head of HHS, which is a job he's not qualified for, but to see him spout off about his take on mental health and wellness being totally skewed, it's like all you really have to do is look at the first 18 years of his life to be " s***." of course, this person doesn't understand mental health and has some really janky ideas of what it looks like and how to actually support people.

Jeremy Schumacher: He's been taught that everyone dies, the best way to handle your s*** is self-medicating, and that we don't talk about people with mental health issues. It's embarrassing. That's not someone you want to put in charge of HHS. but it doesn't stop there for RFK, of course. And I am going to bismerch his personal name left and right here because he's killed a ton of people already, and it's just going to get worse.

00:10:00

Jeremy Schumacher: a talon is maybe a lot at least 83 but probably more this is frustrating right for my own sanity here just going to chime in and say this is not a fun thing to talk about it would be great if we weren't doing this as a country so anyway he at some point goes to law school and somehow gets a degree I'm going to guess having someone else take his  test. This is pure speculation. Having someone else take his test and the Kennedy name probably went pretty far here. but he is trained as a lawyer and worked a lot in environmental spaces. the problem when you're looking at RFK Jr.'s history is that he has a bunch of personal problems that mingled with his professional life.

Jeremy Schumacher: So, he was working to hold corporations accountable for polluting environments. That's admirable, I'm on board for that. Yes, we should be able to hold corporations accountable. Menard's here in Wisconsin is the largest poller in the state. This is well we should hold them accountable.  they should have to pay fines that are large and significant, not capped for what seemed like a reasonably large number in the 1970s. f*** Menards. but going after corporations, great. I can support that. That's good work.

Jeremy Schumacher: he got involved in a bunch of different charity work because again the name Kennedy still carries a bunch of weight even though we haven't had a particularly relevant Kennedy since Blown away. What else do we have to say? Billy Joel might be to blame here for immortalizing Kennedy for generations to come. JFK I have to clarify which Kennedy I'm talking about. but then RFK has a kid who has allergies with a wife that he doesn't particularly care for. He's pretty awful to women. I'm not even get into the sexual assaults here. He's sexually assaulted multiple women. his kid gets allergies while he's working on suing corporations that are putting mercury into the water, which again is good.

Jeremy Schumacher: let's stop corporations from doing that and hold them accountable financially and put people in prison. I'm not on board for the prison part. I'm kind of opposed to the prison industrial complex. Let's not let them run corporations anymore and have them do public service. and take away their money and all the money the corporation made from that ollution. Great. I'm on board. Let's have consequences. Accountability would be lovely. so Kennedy's working on these corporations that are polluting everyone with mercury and he gets it into his head based on nothing other than personal experience as a lawyer and a Kennedy that his kids allergies are because of mercury poisoning and he comes to the conclusion again not based on anything.

Jeremy Schumacher: I cannot reiterate enough that this is not based on anything, just this guy's ideas that vaccines are the cause of the mercury exposure and that his kid has allergies because of vaccines, the measles, mumps, and reubella vaccine.  This gets him into the orbit of antivaxers everywhere, namely Andrew Wakefield, who's a quack. over and over and over again, it's been proven that this guy doctorred his test results and then skewed them even further in how he talked about it to show that vaccines are related to autism. And he's lost his medical license.

Jeremy Schumacher: He's disgraced in the scientific community and the antivax community. loves him. His one study that linked this is fraudulent. we know this factually. This is not an opinion or an interpretation. His results were faked and then he skewed it even further to show that some because he had an agenda, It was bad science and it was a fraudulent study. it has been dism  he has been dismissed and he has then got into a lucrative line of work as the main spokesperson for the antivax community. So Bobby Kennedy links up with this guy and big fan, right? Birds of a feather falconry puns. and so this is sort of where s*** goes off the rails.

00:15:00

Jeremy Schumacher: again, he was recovered from his heroin addiction at this point in his life, but he's got a marriage that's failing. He's got a wife who he is psychologically tormenting. trying to keep the kids away from all this other stuff. She was like a Kennedy fan girl, so that probably wasn't a great relationship from the beginning. He's cheating on her all over the place. it's just a mess. She ends up killing herself in their divorce proceedings and what a nightmare. And so Kennedy throughout this time just sort of goes off the deep end. he throws the Kennedy name behind the antivax movement which at this point didn't have a ton going for it. but at this point Jenny McCarthy gets into the game and then Oprah amplifies this.

Jeremy Schumacher: So, we have a Kennedy and Oprah amplifying the antivax community. And yeah, it's horrific. where I say he's killed 83 people he goes to an island community with what was it? I want to say Ghana, but I don't know if that was right. I should pause my recording here. We're just going to edit this out.

Jeremy Schumacher: in 2018 2019, Kennedy went to Samoa with one of his foundations again that thrived on the Kennedy name, and stirred up a great deal of panic about the MMR vaccine, measel, measles, mumps, and rebella. and basically the country responded by pausing vaccines and said we need more information, which we don't. the study that Kennedy used was the Wakefield study, which had been debunked time and time again as fraudulent and not factually accurate.

Jeremy Schumacher: And so we didn't need more information, but they paused this and then measles ramped up and killed a bunch of kids most of them young children. And Kennedy claims he didn't do that. He didn't literally go say don't get your kid vaccinated. He just headlined a media push to say the vaccines aren't safe and will kill your child.  He didn't say don't get vaccinated, but the vaccines aren't safe and will kill your child. dot implies don't get vaccinated. It's not safe. You don't tell a parent that something's going to kill their child and then say, "The totally up to you. I'm not going to weigh in here." yes, you're weighing in by saying that. Don't let your kid ride in the front seat without a car seat or they'll die.

Jeremy Schumacher: Yeah. Don't let your kid ride in the front seat is what I'm saying. I am telling you not to put your kid in put your kid in a car without a car seat. That's me saying don't do that. Please be safe. Put your kid in a car seat. Make sure they're facing the correct way and securely put in that car seat correctly. Go to your local fire department to make sure that you're doing it right. Yep.  I can advocate for that. So, he's definitely was advocating for and was the whole reason why all these kids died and he's taken zero accountability for it. He said, " I didn't tell them not to get vaccinated." In the same way that he didn't tell a bunch of Texans to not get vaccinated. He just said the vaccine's not safe. You should do your own research, which he's not qualified to do, He's not a scientist. He's a lawyer.

00:20:00

Jeremy Schumacher: I don't even know that his license is still relevant or up to date, but that's not even relevant. So, he killed a bunch of kids 2018, 2019, didn't take any accountability for it, and then COVID hit, which Kennedy became a top three misinformation distributor. again, dude just got deep deep into this and then was connected with it and then the Kennedy name amplified a bunch of stuff.  Basically, they took Wakefield's disgraced study and slapped Kennedy as the spokesperson for it so that Wakefield wouldn't keep getting called out everywhere. Kennedy at some point had his Instagram account delisted or blocked or muted or whatever. in that brief period of time where social media was maybe we should take care of policing disinformation on our sites."

Jeremy Schumacher: what a brief wonderful period of time we had there. and that's what made him get into politics because he'd been silenced from his 800,000 followers or whatever. dude, your name's Kennedy. You can get on any podcast you want because your name's Kennedy, not been silenced. the whole preposterous notion that people are getting cancelled, it's just a stupid timeline to be living through. Just dumb.  you're not being canceled. you went on Rogan to spout out your misinformation. you're not being silenced. But for somebody who'd relatively stayed out of politics his whole life in spite of the Kennedy name decided to get into politics on an antivax platform. So also Kennedy just killed a bunch of people through COVID by being One of the other top disinformation spreaders, I always like to go back to this.

Jeremy Schumacher: was just like a house mom from the UK, not a professional of any kind, just someone perpetually online who shared every bit of disinformation everywhere that she could find. So there you go. A mom from the UK with no medical training and RFK junior no medical training. that's who you're hitching your wagon to, antivaxers.  Trump in his infinite stupidity thought RFK running for president would take a bunch of votes from Joe Biden because Kennedy equals Democrat even though Kennedy had been disavowed by Democrats everywhere for his anti-science stakes. Even his own family has disowned him.

Jeremy Schumacher: there's so much here. also Kennedy cited in the divorce proceedings from the wife who would eventually go on to kill herself. claimed that he had severe brain fog to the point where he couldn't earn as much money as he was making because he had a brain orm.  There's reason to question whether or not he has an actual brain His story, first of all, has not stayed consistent with how he learned about the brainworm. but he cited severe brain fog as a reason to limit his earning potential. Perhaps just to lower the amount of child support he would have to pay or change the amount of aloney. But either way, he's on record in a legal setting saying, "I have severe brain fog." It's in 2012.

Jeremy Schumacher: dude's been on a lot of gear since then. Gear being slang term for steroids. so his brain's not getting better. but yeah, he's going to run for president as a third party spoiler and Trump's like that's great because Kennedy's will take away Democrats.  And then everyone sort of started panicking because the antivax crowd is also the evangelical Republican wing of Trump's base because they're anti-science. And so, whoopsy daisies. Trump and Kennedy decide to team up because Trump says, "I'll put you in my cabinet. You're not going to win and you're taking too many of my votes."

Jeremy Schumacher: Kennedy oddly recorded that very obvious quid proquo but I don't know laws and rules don't matter anymore especially if you're rich. So all of that is to build to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being the head of health and human services and that's so dumb.  And then he had a measles outbreak of course because of course and there's a bunch of cases in Texas and the surrounding area and we're not even talking about that anymore. Measles was stamped out in America. it didn't exist. We had ended it through high vaccination rates. You dummies who are listening to a professional propagandist who has no science background to his name.

00:25:00

Jeremy Schumacher: and kids die. That's where this lands us. we can joke about brainworms and, animal carcasses putting a dead whale's head on top of your car and making your kids deal with the gross juices that fly out of it as you drive home because you're a weirdo and you put a dead bear carcass in Central Park because you thought it would be funny for people to wonder where it came from.  He used to hang out in a dead cow pit for fun. This** guy. And kids are dying because people are listening to him for some reason. Where all this leads us now. April 2025. Kennedy gives a press conference where he says autism is on the rise. It is an epidemic.

Jeremy Schumacher: It is caused by environmental factors that he savior of the autistic community because they're a bunch of invalids who can't write poetry, play baseball, or go on dates and certainly aren't paying taxes need a savior like him and announced in September he would have the results for what's causing autism. All of this is accurate. none of that's true. Rates of autism are on the rise slightly from 1 in 36 kids to one in 31 kids. based on a study conducted in 16 different communities in the United States.

Jeremy Schumacher: that is research that was done well but is by no means a sweeping rise that is causing epidemic levels. we're catching more autism because we are learning how to test for it better. And with things like Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, more people have more resources to work with mental to work with health care providers and mental health providers who are going to use agreed upon literature for that testing. Our testing has improved. More people are testing for it. The rates are going up slightly.

Jeremy Schumacher: there's still discrepancies between men and women male and female because it's testing for kids in this study and discrepancies between marginalized communities and white kids. So there's still work to be done and anyone who works with autism and neurody divergence knows that hey we're working on that stuff. HHS has cut funding to studies like that.  So in one hand they're going to cite this study and mischaracterize its results and just outright make stuff up and in the other hand they're going to cut testing to it or they're going to cut funding to it. So it's maddening. Autism is caused by genetics. We know this for sure. It isn't something that needs to be studied. People with autism pay taxes.

Jeremy Schumacher: saying they don't play baseball's a weird thing cuz if you spend any amount of time around neurody divergent folks who are on the spectrum, people with autism love baseball. I'm joking here. there is a subset of the autistic community that loves statistics and particularly baseball statistics.  So, I'm being a little tongue and cheek here to highlight that even when he's saying b*******, he doesn't even realize how bad of b******* it is by picking something. If you wanted to pick one sport that draws a high number of autistic brains, baseball would be the sport because there's so many stats to and it's such a long season and there's so many games, Just a lot of data. And if you have a neurode divergent brain who hyperfixates on data, baseball is a great thing.

Jeremy Schumacher: So, he's just a dumbass for so many reasons. autistic people have relationships, they fall in love, there's a show on Netflix that's regularly in its top 10. It's like Love on the Spectrum. Again, just ignore the proof of your eyes and just listen to us famous people with no relevant medical training. autistic people pay taxes. So, yeah, they write poetry, they're artists, they're creatives, they're athletes. There's a couple of MLB players who have openly said that they're on the spectrum, let alone all the people who are on the spectrum and just love the stats of baseball. I'm autistic. I played sports at a D1 college. I'm married. I have children. I pay taxes.

00:30:00

Jeremy Schumacher: I grew up playing baseball, too. How about that? I'm a trifecta. I'm not much for writing poetry, although I have a huge albatross tattooed on my back because of my enjoyment of poetry, specifically Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. so yeah, I don't know what he's going on about. He's just wrong about all of it. Everything he said is wrong. autism is not a disease. You can't catch it.  It is genetic. You're born with it. You are autistic your whole life. He also said there's no one his age autistic who has got autism. yeah, because we used to ship them off or we didn't support them and they died young. That's like saying there's no one from the 70s who has AIDS. right?

Jeremy Schumacher: because they all died because we let them die because Mike Pence was the governor of Indiana and thinking about gay people made him feel uncomfortable in his loins. gosh, it's It's so stupid. It's just so wrong. He's just doesn't understand how science works.  A majority of the research that's already being done is studying where autism comes from when again we already know it less than 5% of federal funding is going to study autism across the lifespan. A lot of it is early detection and early support which is great. We should study those things. again to say there aren't old people have autism, right? Because nobody's been studying it.

Jeremy Schumacher: We're just figuring out a better way to catch it young for people, let alone what it looks like for people when they're in their 70s and 80s. Again, he comes from a family where they institutionalize someone after giving them a labbotomy. why there aren't people in your age range who are autistic? They didn't get diagnosed or they weren't supported and died young or we shipped them off to institutions and they died or they killed themselves because they didn't have any support and they felt weird and uncomfortable with society at large who was demonizing them all over the place.

Jeremy Schumacher: Kennedy's a moron is maybe the saving grace of this administration is they're fascists but Himmler was also an idiot. So again to say that the OG Nazis were brilliant strategists is not accurate. So there's a lot of harm that can get done by authoritarian idiots. Kennedy thinks that autism is environmental.  It's He also thinks that profoundly severe cases of autisms as he refers to them as profound cases of profound autism. this isn't really known culture we use anymore, but whatever. Dude's 71 and roided out of his mind and it's got a big old brain worm on steroids in his brain.

Jeremy Schumacher: he thinks that sending neurode divergent folks or people who take stimulant medication, so those of us with ADHD, he thinks that people who are autistic, he thinks that people who are on SSRIs should be sent to wellness farms. in the fascist authoritarian regime, it makes sense to panic that means concentration camps.  Sending people to seek cot in El Salvador is the modern concentration camp. Awitz not in Germany. That's meaningful because the Nazis didn't create concentration camps in their own country. They sent undesirabs to other countries and they didn't start killing them right away. That came later.

Jeremy Schumacher: So Kennedy's rhetoric is incredibly dangerous and scary given the fascist regime that is in charge. And also I think he's just dimwitted enough to think that this is actually helpful. He thinks a hard day's work will help them. but the concern is that Steven Miller would be in charge of making these decisions and it would be putting kids and neurody divergent folks to work to make up for the migrant labor that we're deporting left and right even though we're not holding the businesses and corporations that take advantage of migrant work.

Jeremy Schumacher: or people undocumented immigrants rather than hold the corporations accountable just going to roll back child labor protections. And again, so I think Kennedy thinks yes, this is what would help people. I did much better on heroin is his life story, but he's sober now, so he's going to leave that part out and say time in nature does wonders for people.  from a guy who's never actually had to work hard in his life because his family again has a ton of money from shorting the stock market before the crash. the worst people get money I'm going to see about marrying Jeff Bezos in the future so that I can divorce him like his one wife who's done more for charity than other rich people and all her money just comes from divorcing Jeff Bezos.

00:35:00

Jeremy Schumacher: we to take one for the team and marry Bezos, then divorce him and then put his money to good. so I think the danger here is that RFK really wants to set up wellness camps, allah troubled teen industries. if we send them off for a while, they'll do manual labor and feel better.  And for anyone who knows anything about the troubled teen industry, when we have troubled youths who are often struggling with mental health issues and we send them out into the desert with a disgraced ex-marine, Some of them commit suicide later in life. these this is not actually a helpful thing. We don't send people off to work physical labor to cure their mental health. We don't institutionalize them. that doesn't make it better.

Jeremy Schumacher: And we don't try and cure things that are genetic, that don't have cures and don't need to be cured. That's abusive and terrible. So, I don't think he wants to genocide all neurodyiverent folks like the Nazis actually did. They wanted to do that and then they did it. I think he thinks he's actually helping and he's just a moron. and so he's going to do a lot more harm because rather than look at something like evidence and admit that he's wrong, he's just doubled and tripled down at every chance that he's had to move off the antivax train. I am deeply concerned that wellness farms would turn into concentration camps. I'm not downplaying that. I think he wants to set it up as voluntary and then it wouldn't be.

Jeremy Schumacher: And I think he wants to set it up as treatment and then of course it would turn into abuse. none of these people have ever read the Stanford prison study, I guess. I don't know. I can hold some space that this traumatized dude who's had a very terrible life, has made a lot of mistakes and continued to fail up and now wants to do something good and is going to do a ton of harm instead because he's actually a f** moron. I do think Trump would be okay sending people off and then murdering them.

Jeremy Schumacher: I think Stephen Miller is giddy at the thought of an actual Nazi. so, this isn't the administration to do that. And again, we have so much that's such a stupid conversation to have because that should never happen. It's just that if you were to do that terrible thing that would definitely harm people and lead to their deaths in this administration, they're going to jump on that to get rid of undesirabs.  So the other thing that Kennedy said, especially with the not paying taxes thing that was alarming was then you're creating this idea of undesirabs. You have these people who are taking up resources while not contributing at all. And that's what the Nazis used.

Jeremy Schumacher: That's what the Nazis used again the Nazis in Germany in the 30s to say that they had these mouths that were taking food and not contributing and those were some of the first people they sent to the concentration camps and then they killed.  So definitely hearkening back to the Nazi regime in a scary way that again when they set up before CCOT happened with El Salvador and the administration was thinking about sending people to Guantanamo Bay, nothing bad ever happened there. He said very sarcastically. you had somebody get in front of cameras and say this isn't the camps and if you need to clarify that you're probably making a bad decision.

Jeremy Schumacher: youth sports programs in your local community aren't clarifying that they're not concentration camps because no one thinks are. If you think that something is a concentration camp because you're doing bad stuff that makes people think that, maybe we should slow that roll.  Anyway, the next thing that happened, I'm not even sure where I'm at in recording time here, but this is a long episode because terrible things keep happening. The next thing that happened is Kennedy or a spokesperson for him said, "We're going to get the National Institute for Health to start tracking who has autism, who's been diagnosed, who's on medication, blah blah blah blah blah." And they wouldn't answer any questions about that.

00:40:00

Jeremy Schumacher: They just said we're going to get a registry. And again, when you're part of a fascistic government, an authoritarian regime that is disappearing people without due process, a registry sounds like a bad thing. And so, generally speaking, healthcare information is confidential and anybody who wants to do research is blocked from getting it first of all.  But if they're able to work through the bureaucratic red tape to get access to health information, it is still confidential. So you can get some data like people in this age group show up with this diagnosis this percentage of the time, but you can't get Tommy Baloney from Fifth Street has autism. But the way that RFK talked about it was sort of like we're going to get Tommy Balon's information and put all that into a registry.

Jeremy Schumacher: And so that's concerning because you have ICE running around disappearing people without due process. And then you have the history of fascistic governments rounding up undesirabs in their view people with autism and sending them into the camps. So yeah, that rhetoric is really scary legitimately. again some of these government positions that you can just have a new regime come in and fire a bunch of people and then hire your loyalists. you get those DUI hires in. That's a Pete Hegath joke. I am obviously a fan of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Jeremy Schumacher: The acronym used to be IDEA, which was inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility. which is for people who are physically disabled or have different mental abilities or are veterans. Coding CRT and DI DEI as your new Nword doesn't hide the racism, gang. So, where was I? yeah.  NIH is now also not like doing its job. So, people rightfully were concerned. There was a lot of outrage about this and as of recording on April 28th anyway, Kennedy has backed off on this and the idea of the registry is currently on hold, but it's a thing that we can't let go of and now we have to keep tabs on this because that's a problem. Healthcare information should be confidential.

Jeremy Schumacher: and you have idiots like Doge running around. again, the poster people we want for functional humans with neurode divergent brains are not like an undiagnosed RFK and a self-dagnosed Elon Musk. Yikes. So, going to go off on a tangent about Andrew Tate there, but I'm going to stop. Holding protests is helpful. Holding figures loosely accountable or trying to hold them accountable for being awful people matters. This registry that was going to go through has been halted because of the public outcry. please keep doing the public outcry. there's some bad autism organizations out there that are just antivax groups masquerading.

Jeremy Schumacher: there's some good ones out there, too. the Autistic Self- Advocacy Network is one that I tend to find better than a lot of the other ones. They put out a couple statements recently that I will link to because I think they're worthwhile just to highlight u things that we definitively know. Vaccines do not cause autistic individuals deserve respect and support and evidence-based policy is essential when dealing with neurodiversity. and I don't know, that's a pretty bare minimum that it's just wildly being ignored. The news media is complicit in a lot of this that just because a celebrity says something doesn't mean we need to act like it's true. Just because a reality TV star says something doesn't mean we need to act like it's true.

00:45:00

Jeremy Schumacher: Just because someone named Kennedy it's true. Just because somebody says something on a podcast doesn't mean it's true. And I would hope that people hold that accountability for me and for Joe Rogan the same. yeah, I don't know. I'm somewhat heart heartened. I have some hope that again I don't think Kennedy himself is a fascist.  I do think the government the Trump 2.0 regime is. So he's part of a fascistic regime even if he himself isn't a fascist. but that's dangerous. I think even if he's going to harm people through his version of what he thinks is doing is It's bad in this government and it's not safe and he's being disingenuous to think that he's being helpful to people.

Jeremy Schumacher: He knows better. because he's killed a bunch of people while trying to help them supposedly. So he knows better. He's a moron. he's entitled and he makes money from having the stands. So f*** him. and let's protest and try and hold some accountability here until we can get some functional adults in the room who have relevant expertise.  and let's get some people who can advocate for themselves because they were diagnosed properly and have done the work unlike his undiagnosed self. I dislike this timeline, thanks for tuning in. This was a drab one. I apologize.

Jeremy Schumacher: I was going to have a fellow autistic therapist chime in and rant with me, but we're saving that for later. and this is like, again, I'm a white guy, so I'll put my name out and publicly decry some of this. That is not brave of me. I'm not patting myself on the back. I'm just saying there are people who are a little more rightfully concerned about taking some of these public stances.  So if you are somebody who has benefited from privilege, who still holds privilege status, we need to speak out against this stuff. Yep. keep doing that. and subscribe and share the podcast wherever you listen to podcast. That's super helpful. if you have ideas for guests you would like me to talk to or topics also interested in that. I don't like talking about politics.

Jeremy Schumacher: I would love to be a mental health podcast that never ever ever has to discuss politics again. Be lovely if people who don't have any relevant expertise would stay the f*** away from mental health and stop damaging our mental health. But until that happens, we'll probably have to have some updates on stuff like this. As always, take care of somebody else. Peace.

Meeting ended after 00:48:14 👋

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